With the Passage of the Guantang LNG Terminal Case, the EIA’s Credibility Was Also Destroyed

  With the Passage of the Guantang LNG Terminal Case, the EIA’s Credibility Was Also Destroyed

                                                                  United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

October 13, 2018

 Translation of an Excerpt

The Guantang LNG terminal case was barely passed with the ugliest means in the history of the environmental impact assessment (EIA); the crude political operations were despised by the public, also leaving the EIA system, which had not been good at birth while lacking nutrition and proper care later, totally bruised. During her inaugural address, Tsai Ing-wen declared that "we only have one Taiwan"; now it demonstrates that this was deceptive young literati-style rhetoric. How to salvage the EIA system and rebuild its credibility, we are afraid, is an extremely thorny engineering project.

After the Guantang case was railroaded through, environmental groups angrily lambasted by saying that the "EIA is now dead." The public hoisted a placard with the transcription "Long Live Algae Reefs," personally written by Tsai Ing-wen, in front of the Presidential Palace, demonstrating the greatest of satires. The Tsai government claimed it wanted to "reform" the EIA system, but its approach was always aiming to reduce the procedure of the EIA and accelerate the progression of the passage of the assessment EIA, leaving the credibility of the assessment far behind us. Deputy minister of the Environmental Protection Agency Thomas Shun-Kuei Chan’s resignation elicited reverberations; upon his departure, the two systems about which he was very concerned-- the Air Pollution Act and the Environmental Assessment Act, in fact, had left little for expectations.

The existing EIA system used to have many loopholes, but after years of efforts, it is now on the right track, though not without difficulties, and has won the basic trust of society. Who knew, at the present, the Shenao and Guantang cases, both for collaborating with the government's energy policy, were forcefully railroaded by government officials appointed to the Environmental Protection Conference based on instructions, throwing professional EIA opinions overboard, and also destroying society's trust in the EIA system in an instant. In his resignation statement, Thomas Chan bluntly stated that "Premier Lai’s statements of excessive expectations" and "being forced to arrange additional conference meetings" that elicited protests and boycotts of the Environmental Protection Conference, were precisely the crux that caused the collapse of the EIA system and its complete loss of credibility.

In the EIA system of our country, how to strike a greater balance between development and environmental protection in order to avoid the blocking by the EIA or executive authoritarianism, there is a necessity to reconsider and revise. Among them, the major crux lies in the mentality of the powers that be; once the government or the ministry for development consider the EIA as a tool, refusing to communicate, or abandoning the safeguarding of public interest, then, the lofty talk that "we only have one Taiwan" will, along with "Long Live Algae Reefs," become "rest in peace algae reefs."

Attachment : none